Religions have a specialized vocabulary. You think of missionaries as men of God who travel to remote islands inhabited with hotentots in need of clothes, food and medical attention. But the Mormon term just means recruitment to the church.
And the Mormon priesthood is just a male church member, I think, not a priest in the Catholic sense. (I’m just remembering what was told me by a friend who tried to recruit me ages ago; I’m not an expert.)
Part of it is that that little factoid isn’t quite right. Various evangelical groups are growing faster world-wide and (last I heard) domestically the Jehovah’s Witnesses were growing faster percentage-wise and the Catholics (of all people) were growing the most numbers-wise.
But they are still definitely growing very quickly. Part of that is I think because their more “traditional” humanitarian-based missionary work is very well organized. Supposedly (again, heard anecdotally) they had one of their best domestic recruiting years in modern times after Katrina because their relief effort was one of the best organized.
Mormon’s as one of the fastest growing religions hasn’t been true since the early 90’s. In recent years there is more evidence their membership is declining rather then growing. Even then it was once ‘the fastest growing religion’ it was a percent of market share argument. The Catholic Church based on birth rates alone was adding more members daily.
Mormons themselves continued to tout themselves as the fastest growing religion up until the 2000’s then even they stopped using that bit as a recruiting lingo.
Yeah this. But as mentioned I don’t think that is the case any more. I did my mission in Brazil back in the early 1990s and I baptized around 30 people and worked with 2-3 times as many who eventually were baptized. At the time I really saw it as a “miracle.” In retrospect it was just part of a general change in society. Where the traditional Catholic society breaking down a bit, with a lot of growth for evangelicals of any and all stripes in the area. The Jehovah’s Witnesses and 7th Day Adventists were probably at least as big of winners as us Mormons were,
Nitpick: it’s Raymond, Alberta; a town where the vast majority of residents are Mormon. But you’re right about the tiny–it’s not very big at all. Raymond is about fifteen or twenty minutes south of my location.
The notion of “fastest-growing religion” is meaningless without further context. Fastest-growing over what time period, and in what area? And is it measured relatively, or in absolute numbers? Because if I found a new religion today, and convert a couple friends of mine tomorrow, I can honestly claim that my religion has tripled over the past 24 hours, yielding an impressive growth rate of 200%, and a projected worldwide annual growth rate of 73000%. Such statements need to define their parameters and even what counts as a religion.
And the first Christian groups to use the term “mission” for what they were doing were primarily concerned with religious conversions, mostly in the Americas.
This is just a personal anecdote, but it enlightened me a bit on the LDS missionaries. I was living in Hoboken, NJ at the time (perhaps the 20-30 age set’s yuppie capitol of the world). At about 9am on a Saturday, struggling under a heavy hangover, I heard a ring on the doorbell. Assuming it was my roommate, who had a tendency to forget/lose his keys, I buzzed the interlopers in. Stomp-stomp-stomp,up the stairs they came while I crawled back into my warm bed. Then came a tapping, a rapping at my door.
Wearing only my boxers, I opened the door ready to give my roomie hell for disturbing my sleep. I was greeted by a young man and woman in their Sunday best, and thought, “shit… why the hell is the FBI here?” They started into their missionary bit and I said, “Listen - I don’t mean to be rude, but I’m not going to convert. Catholic school, Jesuit college.”
Their response was “What does Jesuit mean?”
A few minutes of trying to explain Catholicism and what Jesuits are ensued, and I finally ended it with, “listen… you need to do your homework about other beliefs if you want to convince people that their beliefs are wrong. Otherwise, sell vacuum cleaners.”
Closing the door, I realized the my “little friend” had been hanging out the entire time.
I hope they found it as amusing as I did.
That is the best door-to-door missionary story I’ve heard in forever. I’m going to be giggling about that all day now!
My experience with the Mormons (we have quite a few around here) is that, if you tell them you aren’t interested in the religious message, the missionaries will thank you and move on to the next house. If you are friends with a Mormon and you say you aren’t interested, it won’t affect the friendship at all.
Generally nice people - at least around here. In Utah it might be different.
Nice story GiantRat. 
But Master Wang-Ka still has the best greeting missionaries story.
Anyway those probably weren’t LDS. Young Mormons don’t proselytize in mixed doubles. And their highly regimented schedules don’t have them leaving their homes until 10am. Here is the current morning schedule:
6:30am - Arise, pray, exercise (30 minutes), and prepare for the day.
7:30am - Breakfast.
8:00am - Personal study: the Book of Mormon, other scriptures, doctrines of the missionary lessons, other chapters from Preach My Gospel, the Missionary Handbook, and the Missionary Health Guide.
9:00am - Companion study: share what you have learned during personal study, prepare to teach, practice teaching, study chapters from Preach My Gospel, confirm plans for the day.
10:00am - Begin proselyting. Missionaries learning a language study that language for an additional 30 to 60 minutes, including planning language learning activities to use during the day.
So you are unlikely to see Mormon missionaries before 10am at the earliest. They shouldn’t start annoying you until nearly lunchtime.
I’ve read (if someone has more / better information, please correct me if this is wrong) that part of that “fastest growing denomination” claim was due to baptizing dead people. It was alleged that, if someone converts to Mormonism, the Mormon church would attempt to posthumously convert as many of that person’s deceased relatives as possible.
Allegedly, this is part of the reason why the LDS Church has such good genealogical records…it was also alleged that the church had several ministers who spent their entire days conducting baptismal ceremonies for deceased persons.
I’ve had this conversation about a million times.
Mormon Missionary: Would you like to learn something about our church?
Me: I’m sorry but I would never join any group that discriminates aginst certain people.
MM: Oh, our religion would never do that.
Me: You treat all people equaly?
MM: Yes, of course.
Me: So a woman can fully participate in your church?
MM: Yes she can
Me: And be a minister?
MM: Well, no.
Me: So you admit you discriminate against certain groups.
I’ve had the same conversation with many Catholics and Jewish people.
I just saw a few of these lads, in my local library…how times have changed!
Gone are those cheap black slacks, with short sleeved white shirts (pocket protectors too)!
These guys were wearing Armani suits, with nice, conservative silk ties-looked like executive trainees.
They were using the library computers-hope they weren’t surfing the Web (instead of winning converts)!
No, the Mormons don’t count “baptisms for the dead” among their membership. The 13 million members are supposedly 13 million living members. They don’t (officially)* pretend to know whether each dead person has accepted his proxy baptism. And if they counted those, membership would be in the hundreds of millions.
Mormons don’t use the word “ministers” much, but it is true that there are lots of old fogies at the temples who spend their days in the temples performing baptisms, confirmations, priesthood ordinations, washings-and-annointings, secret masonic handshake ceremonies(a.k.a endowments), and weddings “for and in behalf of” the deceased.
ETA: The official 13 million-ish head count does include inactive Mormons. I’m not sure if includes people who are “born in the covenant” but never get baptised.
*There’s plenty of anecdotal stories of “as I was coming up out of the baptismal font, I saw a vision of the deceased thanking me as she was entering Christ’s embrace!”
One reason for the “fastest-growing” claim is that the LDS church does not acknowledge their lousy retention rate for new converts. When one goes through the formal process to join the church he or she is counted for time and eternity on the church rolls, even if that person becomes inactive in the church after a year or two, as many do. Only exception is if they are excommunicated, which is actually fairly rare.
They can be excommunicated, or they can resign. Which is also pretty rare.
Aw, it makes me sad to see people bashing the missionaries. I’ve had plenty of nice encounters with them, one only one negative one (dude was serious about telling me about Jesus and started following me; his partner had to follow him, and looked kind of embarrassed about it). They’re generally polite when you say you’re not interested and no harm’s done.
I know several people who’ve served missions themselves, and they’re all nice and good people.
Thanks for the clarification, Rhodes.
They have always been nice to me too when I told them I had no interest.